HEARING TRUMP'S stream of semi-consciousness before but evermoreso during his war of whim on Iran, the stream of nonsense in which he really seems to believe he can just will his history changing diaster into a victory made me wonder this morning if someone hasn't done one of those Hitler Is Told videos using the performace of Bruno Ganz as Hitler trying to will divisions of his army, either destroyed or unavailable, to fight off the advance of the Soviet Army as it was on the outskirts of Berlin, only to be told, finally, that his dream was impossible. Ganz's performance of Hitler forced to face reality was brilliant. Trump's in reality when only a few reporters have hinted at reality to him, is not. And, even told of reality, he still claims and seems to believe that the war will end on his terms and on his timeline.
THAT IS THE STAGE THAT AMERICA'S LIBERAL DEMOCRACY IN THE AGE OF MEDIA ADDLED AMERICA HAS ACHIEVED. Hitler had some sane but evil and competent men around him who would, finally, tell him what was real and what was impossible, Trump has surrounded himself with As Seen On TV idiots as big as himself or lying Republicans such as Marco Rubio who are proving to be even more cravenly and cowardly corrupt than those who Hitler surrounded himself with.
That it turns out that liberal democracy can, under the eutrophic elite that we have, in politics, in the law, in the media, in academia, etc. produce such a spectacle is certainly one of the hardest lessons to be learned from the downfall of the ill-advised American empire. Only I think most of us facing that reality will be harder than Hitlers subordinates making him face it.
I take it as an indication that my analysis of this is at least on the right track that America's "classical liberal" liberal democracy has been constructed on destroying what I see as the last great hope of American democracy, the hard struggle to turn it from liberal democracy to egalitarian democracy, democracy based on doing to others what we would have the do to us. THAT HAS BEEN THE MAJOR THRUST OF ALMOST ALL OF THOSE POWERS IN AMERICAN LIFE FOR THE PAST HALF A CENTURY, the media, the law, politics and not an inconsiderable amount of academia,* as the backlash against the great struggle for racial, sexual, etc. equality that reached its peak just as Republican-fascism started to get going with the election of Nixon, started and increasingly got the upper hand. I started noticing it by the late 1970s as the "anti-political correctness" stuff started in shock-jock radio, Andrew Dice Clay style comedy and in other venues of show business, including, of course "happy-talk news." Though it is certain that its most potent form was in the ever ascendent "entertainment division" of the corporate and, then, "public" media was far, far more watched and consumed than anything deputed to be "news."
I heard in listening to Lawrence O'Donnell's opening monlogue on his show last night, that he has begun to notice what I noticed and warned about decades ago, that the horrors of Trump's Iran war are seen by him, those around him and those who still believe in him in the most crude of Hollywood and game show and sports terms. He played several videos that the Whitehouse has put out promoting Trump's Iran war, which is already a humanitarian, ecological, geo-political, economic and financial diaster (I list those in term of rising concern to Trump and his kind, in descending order in terms of morality) as even some on his team in the Congress are beginning to admit.
I will repeat what I said yesterday or the day before, Americans who want to have something like a decent legitimate government have to face a horrible truth that Lawrence O'Donnell hasn't yet faced, that we have about a third or more of the citizens of the United States who are so TV and Hollywood and entertainment media addled (the kind who believed that the "Apprentics" franchise documented reality and they wanted a fascist CEO) and that they are concentrated in enough states to produce a minority-vote president, even one who, under the corrupt Constitution can become president even though he loses the vote. After Bush II, after Trump I and, if the poll are at all to be taken seriously, EVEN NOW IN TRUMP II that third of the criminally-fascist inclined American voters seems to be a permanent feature of American life. NO ONE WHO IS A RATIONAL PERSON OF GOOD WILL CAN MORALLY RISK THEM DETERMINING OUR GOVERNMENT EVER AGAIN.
One of the early blog posts I wrote about this condemned what I then called the "process liberal," the kind of liberal who "only wants a level playing field" but who regularly pretend that that will mean that egalitarian democracy wins. In current terms it is the kind of media liberal, often a lawyer who will bask in the Sorkinesque fantasy that if only things could return to some past in American political life then we could rest easy. That is and always has been a fantasy, the kind of fantasy that is peddled by the high-brow, conventional view of American history and society. One which can pretend that the worst of us isn't given a boost in its power by the anti-democracy features of the Constitution, worst of those the Electoral College and anti-equality constitution of the Senate, along with the enhanced power of the Senate to confirm "justices" and judges and other executive branch appointees, judge AND ALMOST ALWAYS STOP impeachment proceedings, to act as the killing field of democratic progress, etc. That the highest concentrations of our stupidest and cruelest are found in enough states, most with small populations though some in states such as Texas and Florida, has driven our aspiring democracy into the death of it in Trump.
On top of that, the ever more consolidated mass media, freed to lie with impunity about, not only politicians and other public figures, but about reality itself, by a combination of the idiocy of those who wrote the First Amendment and the criminals and idiots on Supreme Courts of the past sixty years, is the engine that has driven us to catastrophe, yet again.
O'Donnell rightly considers Trump and his goons to be stupid, they are the stupidest regime in our history and considering the stupidity of Trump I and Bush II, that is saying a mouthful. But he is wrong in trying to use ridicule to dminish them and their thinking beause in the United States of 2026, stupid rules as does cruelty as do do its even more dangerously potent cousins, cynicism and indifference. That his own medium, THE MEDIA, has been the thing that both created Trump as a public and political figue, that thwarted the person who won the 2016 vote and lost the presidency due to the corruption built into our Constitution by lying about her for decades, it is also what has created the conditions that made Trump I AND II possible, perhaps inevitable.
And over all, American capitalism is what has brought us here. It bought the American imperial system that created the American empire, the American hegemony, "The American Century, " and it was also what contained the gradual poisons that would destroy all of that and the aspirations that American democracy might be forced to evolve into egalitarian democracy, a real democracy, a democracy with the informed, well-meaning consent of those governed under it, in short the only really legitimate kind of goverment that is possible. Instead, our entire past under the Constitution, in the period in which the most liberty through legalization of personal and corporate behavior in our history has been the milieu in which that history played out, has brought us to Trump II and what is either our Waterloo or the end of the world in his attack on Iran.
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